london

Clink78, one of London’s many youth hostels, is a converted courthouse, once stately and severe, now sporting a hip, neon vibe. The lobby’s arched ceiling bears quotations about travel: “A tourist doesn’t know where they’ve been,” reads one condescendingly, “A traveler doesn’t know where they’re going.” Another is an attempt at quoting Dickens, and ought…

One of the reasons we chose Lille as our sabbatical home is its position as carrefour – a crossroads, or jumping-off point to northern Europe. Lille is in the northernmost part of France, and thanks to Europe’s excellent high-speed train network, it’s within 2 hours’ travel of Paris, Brussels, Amsterdam, Luxembourg, Cologne and Frankfurt, and…

The first scene in my yet-to-be-written novel is based on an actual rendezvous between Mary Godwin and her future husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley. Mary, 16 years old and altogether smitten with the larger-than-life poet, had been forbidden from having any contact with Percy by her father, so they were obliged to meet in secret to…

Douglas Adams would be pleased at the amount of absurdist bureaucracy and sheer Britishness that characterized my 42nd birthday. We were staying in an airbnb near Old Street Station in London; usually X woke us up promptly at 7am, but this morning S let me sleep in while she and X got breakfast at a…

Travel days are usually an ordeal for our family, but the trip from Lille to London was smooth as silk. This may have been partly because we’d done the mirror-trip when arriving here, six weeks ago, so even X had a fresh memory of what to expect. We also helped ourselves out by taking the…

In the hotel/hostel in London, we all lay beside each other, pretending to sleep. Across the street, the bells of St. Pancras Church tolled, and we heard X murmur, “Oh. It’s one o’clock.” But inside our bodies, it was 6pm the day before. The soupy veil of jet lag settled on us, thick behind our…

X fell asleep in the car on the way to the airport. I envied his calm, but it was too early by our planning. Mind you, we’d tuckered him out that morning by design, with a hectic visit to Dragon’s Tale Blacklight Mini-Golf and Mirror Maze at West Edmonton Mall. And we’d been subtly adjusting…